Special Edition: Drawn Poems

Poetry and drawing share a search for the essential line or gesture that can translate a feeling or an experience into language.

Through readings, visual projections and conversation, this event explores the interrelated gestures of the two, taking us back to an uninhibited childhood practice as a means of stretching poetry away from the constraints of form, convention and temper.

Stephen Watts has drawn poems through much of his life and uses the term ‘drawn poems’ to instinctively describe this process, influenced by the insight young children have that ‘drawing’ and ‘writing’ are not separate or ‘different’ and by the textual practice of poets such as Henri Michaux.

Artist Chiara Ambrosio’s linocut responses to Greek poet Yannis Ritsos’ Monochords enter the spaces opened by language, rendering Ritsos’ 336 single-line poems in line and shape.

Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a multidisciplinary writer who applies the principles of painting to her poems and performances, and whose work often incorporates drawing as a natural extension of language.

This event is co-hosted by Prototype and Sylvia Publishing. Monochords by Yannis Ritsos, with Chiara Ambrosio, and The Grimoire of Grimalkin by Sascha Aurora Akhtar, are both published by Prototype; a collection of Stephen Watts’ drawn poems will be published later this year by Sylvia Publishing.